Text page
Victims Themselves of a Close Encounter; On the Sensory Language and Bass Fiction of Space Ape (In Memoriam)
"Victims Themselves of a Close Encounter; On the Sensory Language and Bass Fiction of Space Ape (In Memoriam)" treats sound as force, showing how vibration, sonic fiction, or acoustic design reorganize affective and political space.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These texts argue that sound is not mere accompaniment to culture. Vibration, bass, and auditory design act directly on bodies, spaces, and publics, making sonic theory a theory of force.
They work by turning acoustics into logistics, atmosphere into pressure, and listening into environmental relation. Sonic fiction and sonic warfare describe how sound reorganizes situations before it is interpreted.
That matters because the section is trying to surface the archive's strongest account of affective mediation. Audio culture becomes a way of thinking force, mood, and coordination together.
How to read this text
Read for how the page moves from music or noise toward vibration, pressure, or environmental effect.
Keep an eye on where listening becomes spatial or political. Those moments usually carry the page's strongest claims.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Memory and matter converge in the affect and sounding of Space Ape as the hostile alien, a virtual body shaped at the intersection of dread bass, riddim warfare and speculative lyricism. Space Ape set out to xorcise that which consumed him from within by embracing the “spirit of change”. Turning to process philosophy, I demonstrate how Space Ape’s bass fiction—his virtual body—activates the abstract concepts of becoming in the close encounter with the hostile alien.
Definition · paragraph 27
van Veen | Victims Themselves of a Close Encounter 111 6 The Hyperdub blog is now archived at <http://riddim.ca>. 7 “Hyperdub” appears as a passing descriptor in Goodman’s Sonic Warfare, in one of two chapters on Afrofuturism, where it appears to signal the rave virus of the hardcore continuum (2010: 165).
Definition · paragraph 12
van Veen | Victims Themselves of a Close Encounter 97 future dubstep. 2-step is thus a temporal concept of double movement between past and future, memory and matter; it signifies the convergence of the shuffling movement of the physical body to the temporal register of the virtual body. Further, its chronopolitics of bass materialism take shape in the bass fiction becoming of the hostile alien who will come to enunciate 2-step as concept.
History · paragraph 10
Dubstep, even in its deconstructive cultural framework as accelerated hyperdub, slows down the movement of the dance floor body, leaving its gestures as suspended in time as dubstep’s echoes are in sounded space. Even as Space Ape may be “deprogramming the body” (Land 2011: 398) through a close encounter with an “alien virus” (“Space Ape”, Burial 2006), Space Ape’s body remains a dread body of bass fiction.
History · paragraph 10
van Veen | Victims Themselves of a Close Encounter 95 However, unlike Land’s cyberpunk phuturism that sought to maximise intensity until “impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dance floor” (2011: 398), Space Ape’s orality transits through the body—at the intersection of the black Atlantic’s virtual body of the hostile alien to the individuated dread body—by way of dubstep’s gravity-fed tempo and dread voicing that pings the sinewave depths of bass materialism.
Appears in sections
Sonic Futures and Audio Theory Primary section
Jungle, Hyperdub, sonic warfare, and the sound-centered pathways into the archive's theory culture.